Now go ask a thousand other parents what their teenagers want and check back here after you do. I think you'll find iStuff to be consistently high up on the list.

BTW your "industry insider" is more commonly known as a shill. He is selling a product. He - of course - isn't going to say "well our product isn't as good as Apple". He is going to say something positive about his product and negative about the competition. That's his job.

Find a neutral third party with a purely objective viewpoint and you'll have an "industry insider" worth listening to.

Privacy is an issue for you with Android devices so your first idea is to turn to an Apple product?

This is were a young person would post a picture of Jackie Chan looking utterly baffled.

You seem to have either a short or selective memory. Prior to the iPhone, the standard practice for cell phones were for handset makers to make phones for carriers with their carrier branding on the case and carrier specific apps permanently installed on the phone. The iPhone was sold to "consumers" and treated like a consumer device rather than something created specifically for a carrier.

Apple has put into place restrictions to protect the privacy of users from third party apps from collecting personal information without concept.

If you are referring to the "log" file that was in the backup file, that did not contain any personal information in it. Location information was stored "ON THE PHONE" to speed up location services acting as a "CACHE".

All carriers are capable of tracking you through their backhaul infrastructure without any help from Apple.

I hate that BS apple propaganda. iPhone outsells every other SMARTPHONE HANDSET on the market. If you look at real data, like Total phones, far far far more dumb phones are sold. And the smartphone market? If you look at a more accurate number, like the number of phones with the iPhone OS or the Android OS on them, Android has double the market share of apple. Apple is able to say they sell the most phones because they only offer one... sure if you break up android sales by model, each one gets a much smaller share... but that's stupid.

The plural of anecdote is NOT data. Data implies a controlled set of information that can be plotted against a single (or at least a few known) variables. An anecdote has no control of its variance, which makes it impossible to compare to other randomly collected anecdotes.

I'm still trying to figure out why I supposedly need to be connected to Facebook 24 hours a day. Constant mobile internet connections were cool... in 1990. Today they're a sign of a lack of real life.

Really? I can sit in a meeting at work (or anywhere, for that matter, even without wifi) and use my phone to open a Windows remote desktop connection (or SSH session) to the server and actually write code on the server right through my phone. People are amazed when they give me a bug report at the beginning of a meeting which is fixed by the end. No laptop required, my laptop stays on my desk now.

You may only use the internet to connect to Facebook, but there are other people who get real work done even using their phones.

I can also check Slashdot on the shitter, so I've got that going for me. Which is nice.

To better clarify my earlier post, and what I mean about having to add the swipe keyboard yourself (thanks Microsoft!) check out this blog post: http://everythingn9.com/advanced-keyboard-functions-nokia-n9 [everythingn9.com]. Having done so, this OS really can be used one-handed if so desired, with minimal strain if any (once practiced).

My wife now has a WP7 phone (HTC Arrive) and loves it. The OS seems well put together and while it doesn't seem to be a power user phone it does many of the functions better of being a phone, text platform, and media consumption device much more smoothly than either iOS or Android. I use both an Android (Galaxy SII currently) and an iPhone 4 on a daily basis, my preference is heavily on the Android side for many usability and functionality reasons. I also run custom ROMs on my android vs. stock on the iPhone which may have much to do with my experience.

That said the WP7 has been impressive enough that it may just be my next phone.

@ Prior to the iPhone, the standard practice for cell phones were for handset makers to make phones for carriers with their carrier branding on the case and carrier specific apps permanently installed on the phone. @

You forgot to add "in the USA". You could get unlocked, unbranded phones in Europe before iphone and sure you can get it after.

I don't bitch about Microsoft Windows because its popular (though it is), I bitch about it because it makes my days unending drudgery and pain.I know you will probably think I am drinking the Slashdot cool-aid, but I assure you 90% of the frustration in my day is caused by something Microsoft did.I also have Apple, Linux and Solaris machines and none of them give me the "WTF were they thinking?!" headaches that Windows does.

Can't provide citations since the numbers I saw were internal, but the smartphones thing is very much a Western and developed Asian phenomenon. In terms of numbers, the biggest seller out there is still the Nokia something-or-other, 1112 maybe, despite being pathetic in comparison to any smartphone.
In large parts of the world, the only thing that counts is price and battery life.

I am no fan of Nokia's recent moves, but to claim that their phones don't sell is simply inaccurate. Nokia sold more 5230 phones in one year alone last year (2010) than Apple has sold iPhones in the whole five years from 2007-2011. Nokia has also produced the best selling phone for many of the years on record. List of best-selling mobile phones: [wikipedia.org]

If the sales comparison is restricted to smartphones and recent year, then both Samsung Galaxy S and HTC Desire have large sales (30 million and 21 million respectively). Total iPhone sales in 2010 was 40 million, so neither HTC nor Samsung is being outsold by "an order of magnitude".

For the record, your info is (half a year) out of date. As of the Mango SDK release, WP7 now officially includes TCP and UDP sockets. Yes, it was idiotic of them to ship without those in the beginning, but they are available.

Unofficially, where I do most of my development, WP7 has a full WinSock stack, but you're not going to get those into the Marketplace. Apps using System.Net.Sockets will and have, though.